Magazine Article 2000 (EHE News) My Gateway Experience - Joseph M. Felser

faces, but I know they are despondent. Who are they? I wonder. I am reminded of the ancient Greek figures of the Three Fates. There are other images, but that is the one that sticks in my mind. In the debriefing after the tape, the trainers explain that “No Time” really means that all times, past, present, and future are available. Then John, one of the trainers, turns the page on the presentation board in front of the room. The picture revealed is a sketch of a wheel of time with the number 15 inscribed in the center and spokes leading out representing different dates (200 BC, 2000 AD, etc.). I am int igued. Did I actually see something like this in the meditation? Was this my “wooden dartboard”? “Oohs” and “aahs” erupt throughout the group indicating that others had had their own glimpses of such “wheels.” I mention my image of the Three Sisters to the trainers. As I do so, I am surprised by the emotion in my own voice as I describe the image. Karen gently suggests that there is something there for me in that image. Suddenly overwhelmed with I know not what emotion, I can only nod in agreement. The next exercise, a Free Flow 15, produces a chaotic cacophony of images. I seem to be riding the tumultuous wave of feeling that had built up in the debriefing room. For the first time at the Gateway, I am experiencing raw fear. I feel caught up in some sort of emotional vortex, and I'm not sure where it is taking me. The sense of spinning (out of control?) is almost nauseating, like having a hangover. All the images are indistinct, zooming by in a blur. I ask about the image of the three moumers. What does this mean? Old parts of myself must die, I am told. The women represent my feminine side. They are grieving for that which is, and must be, lost. Coming out of the exercise, I feel shaky, tense, fragile. By lunchtime, I am verging on a panic attack, The image of the three sisters in mourning still haunts me, and I don't even know why. I am swollen with nameless emotions I cannot pin down or even feel. | worry that I may burst. Can I handle this? The feelings are building up to some sort of crescendo, I don't know if I'll be able to continue the Program. Or maybe I'll just go back into the CHEC unit and just lie there and not listen to the tapes. The anxiety, which comes in waves, is itself --- PAGE 6 (OCR) --- frightening. What is behind the fear of fear? This emotional pattern seems familiar to me, yet | am in the grip of a nameless terror that shoots fiery hot bolts of fear through the very core of my being. Lee, the assistant trainer, joins me for lunch at a table for two. I don't know if he notices what shape I'm in, but I figure I'll try to act calm and maybe I will be. I feel like I'm trying to soothe some frightened animal. We chat about something having to do with my research, but my mind keeps turning inward, to this heavy knot of a fear ball that seems to have localized inside my stomach. Suddenly I am shaken by a great spasm of fear that I do my best to conceal. Lee seems not to notice, or if he does, he says nothing. But his presence has had somewhat of a calming effect. Maybe I'll make it, I think. Then the next minute I wonder, Did I make a mistake in coming? What's going on? I join most of the rest of the group for the afternoon tour of the lab facilities. Skip Atwater, the genial head technician of TMI, gives a lively presentation on the Hemi-Sync process and his own early experiences with Bob Monroe's work at the old Whistlefield location of the institute. Despite my inner turmoil, Skip's presentation interests me, and his good humor snaps me out of myself just a bit. | manage to ask him a question during his talk in David Francis Hall. By the end of the lab tour, I feel a little less shaky, a bit more confident. I've got to figure out what's going on, I tell myself. I don't want to run from this. Go through it. Ride it out. The next tape we do is The Visit, in which Bob's soothing voice takes us on a guided meditation that includes a walk along a beach and a journey deep inside a cave to a door. Beyond the door, Bob tells us, is a white light, where “Friends” have been eagerly waiting to give us certain messages. I find myself sitting on a couch, waiting to see who shows up. Dave, my late father-in-law, sits down beside me, looking fit and well rested, and younger than J remember him. “Tell Cyndie I love her, and that I'm all right,” he says. Then the scene fades. | feel a vague pressure, as if there are others waiting in the wings who wish to come through. But some part of me resists. | tell myself I'm just making it all up. But if so, why, | wonder, would I choose to see Dave of all people? Is there a special meaning here? After The Visit, still reeling from the emotional roller coaster of the morning, I am now assaulted by new questions from all sides. 1 don't know what to think about my own experience, even. though in theory I accept the existence of life after death. The “message” from Cyndie's father sounded hokey, like the vague reassuring platitudes produced by various self-professed spirit mediums. Yet, it was totally unlike Dave to make such an open statement of feeling. If I were subconsciously producing such an encounter, wouldn't I stick to what I knew of his personality? Moreover, only a few weeks before, I'd had a strangely realistic dream in a, which Dave had appeared. He asked me several times whether I'd gotten the Chock Full O' Nuts coffee, and I impatiently replied that | hadn't had time. It was as if he had been trying to jog my memory. When I told Cyndie about the dream the next day, we both laughed as we spontaneously burst into the old ditty: “Chock Full O' Nuts is that heavenly coffee. . . .” Was it really Dave trying to get the message through to me that he was O.K. by calling my attention to an old advertising jingle? And now, he was showing up once again, because | didn't seem to get it the first time around. Or was his uncharacteristic emotional openness meant to trigger an opening of my own? It is during (or, more accurately, just before) the next tape exercise, called appropriately enough, Release and Let Go, that the dam finally breaks. | am ensconced in the CHEC unit with my headphones on, waiting for the exercise to begin. As is customary, the trainers provide some inspirational music in our CHEC unit speakers while we voyagers are attending to emptying our bladders and putting on our ready lights to indicate all systems go. The music, I realize, is the old spiritual, Going Home, which has numerous associations for me. The music itself and the thought of “home” trigger an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, loss, and sadness. Tears flow down my cheeks. I cannot stop sobbing. I finally feel the grief of the three sisters. Now I know what had been hiding behind the mask of anxiety. The death of loved ones, the missing parts of myself that had been sentenced to solitary confinement, the ways in which I had compensated for my _ childhood sensitivities—Home. I am sure that I will not be able to do the tape. But as I hear Bob's familiar reassuring voice asking us to “Begin your preparatory process,” I surprise myself by being able to follow along. In the exercise, we are prompted to return to our Energy Conversion Box, an imagined container where we usually store our anxieties and other preoccupations that might interfere with a session. Now we are instructed to open the box and release some of the items stored therein, allowing them to float up and away. One of the items I find myself jettisoning is a black suitcase. After the exercise, | feel cleansed, purged, traveling light. The sadness lingers, but only as an afterglow. It does not frighten me now. By the end of the day, I feel as if ] have endured a severe storm. This is the calm after the storm. My tee-shirt would read: “I have survived.” WEDNESDAY MORNING We are to have a silent morning; even direct eye contact (a form of communication, after all) is discouraged. I feel a bit like a monk, having to remember to avert my eyes to the floor when | pass a fellow voyager. The highlight of the morning exercises --- PAGE 7 (OCR) --- for me is the second tape, where in Focus 12 we are to open ourselves to receiving five messages from our Guidance or Higher Self. Part of me cringes at the thought. Am I afraid of hearing something? Is that “something” my own inyeterately self-critical voice? Or is it rather that I'm afraid of hearing nothing at all—that I'll discover there's only emptiness inside, the same silence that we are supposedly cultivating this morning on the outside. I'm not a little apprehensive. As the exercise begins, I can feel myself flinch, as if ducking a feigned punch, as I invite messages from my unnamed source. But I am absolutely flabbergasted as five successive messages flash into my awareness with astonishing rapidity and clarity. “You have no time to waste,” I'm told in no uncertain terms. “You have many gifts to give.” “You have held yourself back for too long.” “You have every reason to be thankful.” And finally: “You are loved.” It is not at all what I expected. I am greeted neither by a litany of my flaws nor a frustrating wall of silence. I am being encouraged, reassured, strengthened for the mission ahead. But what is the mission? And who or what is doing the encouraging? Is this my own subconscious speaking? How come it never spoke to me like that before? If I have no time to waste, then what, exactly, am I supposed to be doing? I feel enormous gratitude for these messages, and I thank the universe, But I also have unanswered questions. The next exercise, Repatterning, takes place in Focus 15. As Bob tells us to count up in our minds from Focus 12 to Focus 15, I momentarily feel as if I am lifting out of my body! I have never had a fully conscious out-of- body experience while awake. This is the closest I have come. In 15, I glimpse a number of fragmentary images. T also hear an inner voice quietly counting numbers. It is a man's voice, and it has a German accent. (I learn later that Gunther, who has a heavy German accent, occupies a CHEC unit in the room down the hall from mine. He says he wasn't counting out loud. And even if he had been doing so, and at some volume, with my headphones on I could not have heard him through my physical ears. And it was not a physical hearing in any case. Focus 12 is known as the “state of expanded awareness,” which includes psi perceptions.) WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON We are now to be taken from Focus 15 to Focus 21, which is described as a portal or bridgehead to other realities or nonphysical energy systems. I feel very Spacey, as if I'm floating several feet off the mattress in my CHEC unit. I experience Focus 21 in the form ofa Stanley Kubrick-like movie set, a huge barn of a sparsely furnished soundstage in which everything, including the couch and cocktail table (the only objects 23 in sight), is white. An illustrious parade of comic figures makes a series of quick cameo appearances: Woody Allen, John Cleese, and the cartoon character Wiley Coyote! It is so bizarre. At first, I'm annoyed. “What is this, some sort of joke?” I complain. I was expecting something otherworldly, and all | get is Hollywood! Afterwards, I am more appreciative of the symbolism. I recall that a few years back | became defensive when someone I'd met at a writer's workshop asked me if it was difficult for me to have fun. In truth, I sometimes felt as if I'd lost my sense of humor and my natural capacity for spontaneous play. Everything was always so damned serious and important and so utterly scheduled. Could it be that my own personal bridgehead to “other reality systems” lay through the forbidden territory of joy? During the debriefing following the exercise, Robert, who has said little, speaks up. He is a huge bear of a man, a retired member of the military and a Vietnam vet,